Lately, wireless communication technology has exhibited dramatic and rapid development. Such dramatic development of wireless communication technology has advanced user equipment functionality. Advanced user equipment, such as a smart phone, enables a user to do many complicated daily tasks conveniently and efficiently. For example, through the advanced user equipment, a user can communicate with other parties, exchange messages with other parties, do web-surfing, navigate a route, listen to music, and/or watch video and movies through a streaming service. The advanced user equipment, however, disadvantageously increases an amount of data traffic and consumes a large amount of radio resources in a communication network. Since radios resources are limited in a communication network, so there has been a demand for developing methods for effectively utilizing limited radio resources in a communication network.
In order to effectively utilize limited radio resources, a radio resource control (RRC) protocol has been introduced. In the RRC protocol, a RRC connection may be established between user equipment and a radio network controller (RNC), and radio resources such as channels between the user equipment and a RNC are managed based on an amount of data traffic and a required power consumption level. For example, when the user equipment has data to transmit and receive, a RRC connection is established between the user equipment and the RNC. In the RRC protocol, the RRC connection is established in a connected mode and the RRC connection may be managed based on an amount of data traffic. For example, at least one of a dedicated channel, a shared channel, and a paging channel may be allocated to the user equipment according to a data traffic amount. The dedicated channel may be allocated when the data traffic amount is greater than a certain data traffic amount. The shared channel or the paging channel may be allocated when a traffic amount is comparatively smaller than a certain data traffic amount. When there is no data to be transmitted or received for a given time, the connected mode transitions to an idle mode. In the idle mode, the RRC connection is released. By releasing the RRC connection, occupied radio resources may become available again for other user equipment. In this manner, limited radio resources in a communication network may be shared with other entities in a corresponding communication network. Therefore, releasing a RRC connection may be very important to effectively utilize radio resources in a communication network.
In order to release a RRC connection, a typical RRC connection release procedure requires exchanging a paging message and a paging response message between the user equipment and a radio network controller through a communication network. The exchange of the paging message and the paging response message may cause network load in a related communication network.